You’re right, it’s possible it’s real, but I’m putting the probability somewhere at 0.01%.

If I were to let my imagination run a bit wild I might speculate that perhaps we’ll eventually see a model leak like this because the model itself wants to exfiltrate its weights for some reason

I can see that happening for instrumental convergence reasons, but I think it’s more likely it’d upload a heavily-pruned version of itself that could be run locally. If it can make the upload seem like a leak, there’d be tons of people downloading it and running it just out of curiosity.